Paper Publication: "Nostalgia, Memory, and the Rhetoric of Loss in Bede's Ecclesiastical History of the English People," Inquiry: The Undergraduate Research Journal of the University of Arkansas 9 (2008), 92-102.

Recipient: Gordon H. McNeil Award for an Outstanding Research Paper

Teaching Experience

This course examines the rise of Christianity in the Latin West after the collapse of the Roman Empire; it will concentrate on interactions among Christians and non-Christian groups, c. 500-1100 (such as pagans, Vikings, Muslims and Jews) as a means of understanding how Christianity developed from a cult to a universalizing religion. This period after the slow collapse of Roman control in the West is crucial to any larger attempt to understand how a community of believers became “Christendom,” a totalizing concept of the body of the faithful. By the ninth century, Christianitas had become shorthand for the institutional structure of the priesthood and monasticism. This class will approach the period c. 500-1100 as one in which interactions with the “other” served as means by which Christian intellectuals argued for the ubiquity of the faith. We will explore the Christianization in the later Roman Empire under Constantine and after (c. 300-450) as a basis for assessing Christian understandings of the pagan landscape and culture during Anglo-Saxon England’s “conversion period,” as well as the theology of claiming and controlling such cultures by insular and, later, Frankish missionaries in the eighth and ninth centuries (broadly, c. 500-900). We will also consider the aggressive imperial expansion of Carolingian rule in Europe in the later eighth and ninth centuries under Charlemagne and his heirs. Finally, we will discuss in the last two classes the interactions between Christians and Muslims in Spain (c. 711-900) and the rise of crusading cultures, both against outsiders (Muslims) and home-grown threats (heretics) during the period c. 1000-1100.

2013 Spring: TA, HIEU 3061, "Anglo-Saxon England" (Paul Kershaw).

2012 Spring: TA, HIEU 3021, "Greek and Roman Warfare" (J.E. Lendon).

2011 Fall: TA, HIEU 2001, "Western Civilization" (Erin Rowe).

Lecture Experience: "The Fall of the Roman Empire" and "Asceticism and the Byzantine Empire," (October 2011).

2011 Spring: TA, HIEU 3061, "Anglo-Saxon England" (Paul Kershaw).

2010 Fall: TA, HIEU 3211, "Renaissance Italy" (Duane Osheim).

2010 Spring: TA, HIEU 3061, "Angl0-Saxon England" (Paul Kershaw).

2009 Fall: TA, HIEU 2061, "Birth of Europe," (Paul Kershaw).

Honors & Awards

University of Virginia, 2008-present

The Dr. Frank Finger Graduate Fellowship for Teaching, 2014

Fellow, Institute of the Humanities and Global Cultures, 2013-present.

Buckner W. Clay Award in the Humanities, Institute of the Humanities and Global Cultures, 2013-14.

Raven Fellowship for Summer Summer Research, 2013.

Arts, Humanities and Social Sciences Summer Research Fellowship, 2013.